foreigners America's Latest African Blunder

Sometimes, authors of tell-all memoirs reveal even more than they realize. One such revelation comes on Page 347 of John Bolton's Surrender Is Not an Option, published earlier this month. I doubt most reviewers noticed the line as they leafed through the book in search of the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations' famous putdowns. But for anyone who follows events in the Horn of Africa, it had all the impact of a small explosion.

Bolton, whose contempt for the United Nations is only matched by his exasperation with the State Department, recounts the position Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer adopted in 2006 toward the "final and binding" ruling an international commission had reached over the Eritrean-Ethiopian border, the cause of a war that claimed some 90,000 lives.

"For reasons I never understood," writes Bolton, "Frazer reversed course, and asked in early February to reopen the 2002 [Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission] decision, which she had concluded was wrong, and award a major piece of disputed territory to Ethiopia. I was at a loss how to explain that to the Security Council, so I didn't."

Why should this interest anyone outside the United Nations? Because, at a peculiarly sensitive moment in the Horn's history, Bolton's words confirm what those who follow U.S. policy in Africa sensed but could never prove: While presenting itself as a neutral player in a bitter contest between two African regimes, Washington has in fact played the old Cold War game, favoring realpolitik over international law—with disastrous results.

The decision Bolton cites was meant to settle where the fuzzy international frontier between Ethiopia and Eritrea really lay. While the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission allotted many areas Eritrea claimed to Ethiopia, the village of Badme, a flashpoint of the 1998-2000 war, went to Eritrea. It was a decision Addis Ababa found impossible to swallow. As Bolton writes, "Ethiopia had agreed on a mechanism to resolve the border dispute in 2000 and was now welching on the deal."

What was at stake was never Badme village itself or its surrounding land. Nor, despite much trumpeting to that effect, was Ethiopia overly preoccupied by the fate of villagers whose settlements the EEBC line cut across. The standoff was all about wounded Ethiopian pride. Demarcation meant implicit recognition that the 1998-2000 war, which the Ethiopian army effectively won, was fought on a faulty premise. In Addis' eyes, it also meant accepting arrogant Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki's view of his tiny, strident nation as a significant regional player.

As a witness to the Algiers agreement that ended hostilities and established the EEBC, Washington has always publicly asserted its support for the commission's ruling. That finding was never Frazer's to challenge or change. No doubt her legal advisers warned her against the folly of trying to reopen a unanimous decision that took 13 months to reach, hence Washington's subsequent silence on the matter.

But Washington has, in every other respect, made its bias clear. Having decided Ethiopia was the region's linchpin state and a key ally in its campaign against Islamic extremism, it failed to pressure or punish Prime Minister Meles Zenawi when he defied international law. Ethiopia remains the biggest African recipient of U.S. aid—$500 million a year—and the strikes Washington launched at retreating Islamist fighters when Ethiopian forces overran Somalia last December illustrated the closeness of the two administrations' military cooperation.

Bolton's revelation could not come at a more sensitive time. The EEBC, which once planned to mark the line with cement pillars, says it considers its mission fulfilled at the end of this month. Exhausted by five years of Ethiopian foot-dragging, it intends to disband on Nov. 30, and the border will then be considered officially designated.

The fast-approaching deadline has both regimes in jittery mode. Eritrea accuses Addis of plotting to invade; Ethiopia denies this but has boosted military spending and warns that another war would be fought to the finish. Analysts say neither nation's forces are in a fit state to reopen hostilities, but a quarter of a million heavily armed troops stand mustered at the border. The International Crisis Group, which regards the possibility of a new war as "very real," has called for the United States to use its influence to rein in Addis and on the U.N. Security Council to reiterate its support for the EEBC ruling.

Washington, the only power that enjoys any effective leverage over Prime Minister Zenawi, appears to believe that in bolstering Ethiopia, it is backing a force for stability, a diplomatic approach that dates back to Emperor Haile Selassie's era. The opposite is probably true, because the unsettled border issue has acted as a festering sore, infecting the entire region.

Stalemated on the border issue, the two leaders have continued to wage a proxy war in alternative venues, each supporting rebel movements committed to their rival's downfall. Somalia has been the first major casualty of this cynical game: Eritrea's arming of the Islamic Courts Union was regarded as intolerable provocation by Addis, which sent its tanks rolling in.

Having boasted last December that it could pacify Somalia within two weeks, Ethiopia is now confronting the same hearts-and-minds problem as U.S. troops in Baghdad. The hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees streaming out of Mogadishu, like the villagers emerging from the Ogaden region with tales of Ethiopian rape and plunder, will provide future Islamist movements with easy recruits.

But the reverberations of the EEBC debacle spread much further. Why, in the future, should any well-connected African state ever agree to obey an international ruling that finds in favor of a smaller, weaker rival?

Washington appears to have learned nothing from the past, when the decision to embrace unsavory African strongmen purely on the basis of their anti-Communist credentials proved the most short-sighted of investments. Now, just as then, such supposed pragmatism is proving counterproductive, turning an already unstable region into a war-torn, refugee-plagued, famine-afflicted recruiting ground for extremism.

In the photographs of his arrest, Garry Kasparov—former world chess champion, current Russian opposition leader—is wearing a nondescript gray jacket and a somewhat retro wool cap. He is gloveless. By contrast, the Russian militiamen making the arrest are kitted out in full regalia: tall fur hats with metal insignia in the center, camouflage coats, walkie-talkies, black leather gloves. Squint hard, and the pictures—taken at this weekend's "Other Russia" protest rally in Moscow—could come from the 1960s or the 1980s, back when Soviet police arrested Soviet dissidents with some regularity.

The similarity is more than merely visual. In its heyday, the Soviet dissident movement was a sometimes odd, often unworkable amalgam of human rights activists, disappointed insiders, bloody-minded outsiders, fervent religious believers, and nationalists of a wide range of Soviet nationalities. Some of them would have been right at home at any generic "no nukes" rally, others would have found themselves on the far right of any political spectrum in the world, but it hardly mattered. In 1983, Peter Reddaway, then the leading academic observer of Soviet dissidents, reckoned they had made "little or no headway among the mass of ordinary people."

The current movement is no different. Kasparov himself, still better known for his titanic battles against the world's smartest chess computer than for his political acumen, is sui generis. His allies in the "Other Russia" movement are an odd mix, too. Among them are formerly mainstream economic liberals, including Boris Nemtsov, once deputy prime minister; the would-be fascists of the National Bolshevik Party, led by Eduard Limonov, an ex-dissident, ex-punk, ex-writer; and the remnants of the human rights movement, most notably the Moscow Helsinki Group. Just as the old dissident movement was united only by its hatred of Soviet communism, "Other Russia" is an umbrella organization, united only by its hatred of Putinism, an ideology that has solidified in recent months into something resembling an old-fashioned personality cult.

Odder still is the fact that we hear anything about them at all. Until recently, this ragtag group of elderly ex-dissidents and twentysomethings would surely have been tolerated by the authorities, whose attitude to political opposition used to be a good deal subtler. During most of his presidency, Putin's "managed democracy" permitted many forms of political dissent, so long as they remained extremely small. Although most TV stations are controlled one way or another by the Kremlin, a few low-circulation newspapers were allowed to keep up some criticism. Although anyone with real potential to oppose Putin was dissuaded or destroyed, a few unpopular critics, Kasparov among them, were allowed to keep talking. A bit of pressure was released, and the regime was never really challenged.

In the past year, things have changed. The still-unsolved murder of journalist and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya was followed by regular physical and verbal attacks on the president's opponents. Typical of the latter was Pravda.ru, which last spring called the anti-Putin opposition a "motley army of deviants, criminals, wannabe politicians, fraudsters and gangsters on the fringes of Russian society." Putin himself calls them scavenging "jackals" who live on foreign handouts.

But if they really are deviants and jackals, why arrest them? If Putin really is wildly popular, why bother calling them names? Kasparov himself answers this question—one of many political mysteries in Russia at the moment—by arguing that Putin is far less secure than he appears to be. During a recent lecture in Warsaw, I heard him convince a large crowd that Russian opinion polling in general should be taken with a grain of salt: In an authoritarian society, especially a post-Soviet one, who tells the truth to a stranger over the telephone? He also claimed that polls asking more specific questions—"Is your city well-run? Is your mayor corrupt?"—produce a far less contented portrait of Russian society than questions like, "Do you approve of Vladimir Putin?"

Maybe so—but that doesn't exclude the other, grimmer explanation, which is that Putin beats up his opposition because he can. The dollar is sinking, Bush is fading, and Europe still doesn't have a unified Russia policy. Meanwhile, Russia is awash in oil money, next week's parliamentary elections will go the Kremlin's way no matter what, and why should the Russian president care if there's some name-calling in the Washington Post?

Putin and his entourage have already got most of what they wanted from the West—including the chance to host a G8 summit in St. Petersburg. If this weekend's photographs look like they were taken 30 years ago, why should they care? Few in Russia will see them. And most of those who do will surely draw the intended conclusion, keeping well away the next time a crowd gathers in a Moscow square.

gabfest
The Larry Summers Memorial Thanksgiving Gabfest
Listen to Slate's weekly political show.
By Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, Dana Milbank, David Plotz, and June Thomas
Monday, November 26, 2007, at 3:15 PM ET

To play the Nov. 23 Gabfest, click the arrow on the audio player below:



You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

On today's agenda: Barack Obama surges in Iowa, a stem-cell breakthrough, and D.C.'s handgun law goes to court.

Our e-mail address is podcasts@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.) Posted by June Thomas at 3:15 p.m.

Friday, Nov. 16, 2007

To play the Nov. 16 Gabfest, download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

On this week's agenda: bad news for Hillary; parsing the good news from Iraq; and the debate over whether to issue driver's licenses to undocumented aliens.

Some of the articles mentioned in the discussion:

Emily's "XX Factor" post on John McCain's "gaffe"

Our e-mail address is podcasts@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.) Posted by June Thomas at 3:30 p.m.

The Gabfest crew reconvened in the D.C. radio room to discuss Rudy's hookup with Pat Robertson, Hillary's gender politics, the worrying turn of events in Pakistan, and our sick economy.

Our e-mail address is podcasts@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.) Posted by June Thomas at 2:15 p.m.

Friday, Nov. 2, 2007

To play the Nov. 2 Gabfest, download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

David is traveling this week, but the Washington Post's "Washington Sketch" writer, Dana Milbank, joined John and Emily to chew over debating Democrats, the Republican doing Meet the Press on Sunday, and the flap over waterboarding. And in a shocking development, John offers a "Cocktail Chatter" nugget that doesn't involve polling!

Some of the articles mentioned in the discussion:

The waterboarding video Emily mentioned

Our e-mail address is podcasts@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.) Posted by June Thomas at 1:19 p.m.

On this week's show, Emily, John, and David discuss the latest political dramas, Californian fires and signs of Armageddon, and the New Republic's "Iraq Diarist" dilemma.

Since the D.C. Slatesters moved into their swank new digs, the dimensions and acoustics of the new "studio" have been topics of some fascination for gabbers and listeners alike. By popular demand, we present a photographic explanation for why it sometimes sounds as though the Gabfest is recorded in a wind tunnel—the soundproofing is still a work in progress. (That's the carpet that Emily was responsible for selecting, BTW. I'm told it was reattached to the wall before the Oct. 26 show was recorded.)

Our e-mail address is podcasts@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.) Posted by June Thomas at 1:22 p.m.

gardening
The Fire Next Time
How wildfire preparedness is turning California into Arizona.
By Constance Casey
Friday, November 30, 2007, at 7:20 AM ET

The Santa Ana wind, which hits Southern California like a parched hurricane almost every fall, followed an unusually dry winter and spring this year. The California summer was, as usual, hot and rainless. An autumn with dry earth, dry trees, dry grass—all it took was a spark.

The sour though sensible aftereffect of the Malibu and San Diego County fires is that California homeowners are beginning to look at their trees and plants not as beloved and beautiful green stuff but as fuel for a future fire.

The lingering edginess and increased sensitivity to this threat is a lot like the way Californians feel about earthquakes. It would be nice to put the wineglasses up there on a shelf over the sink, but in a quake those glasses would be dangerous missiles. Similarly, it would be lovely to have that oak tree at the corner of the house shading the deck, but fire could race up the tree trunk to the roof. Now, in fact, wooden decks are strongly discouraged, and should be replaced by stone or cement patios. A rose-covered cottage is now perceived as a firetrap.

When your biggest investment is a house in fire country, every green thing that could turn brown starts to look like "flammable material," in the terminology of firefighters. Indeed, a relatively new law requires Californians to remove dead, brown flammable material and to severely thin out even potentially flammable green material. Property owners must maintain a lean, clean relatively bare zone in an area of 30 feet immediately surrounding a house, plus a "reduced fuel zone" in the remaining 70 feet or to the property line.

It's quite a precedent. On the positive side, the clear space makes the house less likely to ignite, though in a high wind all bets are off. The bare area makes defending a home less dangerous for firefighters. But this cleanup also means no more picturesque tall grasses; no more woody trumpet vine or wisteria winding up the front porch pillar; no more paths carpeted with pine needles or wood chips; no groves or tall hedges, since under the law, trees must be at least 10 feet apart, 30 feet apart on a slope.

Home gardeners are advised to space shrubs as well as trees far apart to prevent fire from jumping from bush to bush. A disconcerting passage on this topic from one University of California advisory (PDF) reads, "The actual between-plant spacing depends on one's aversion to the risk of fire spreading to one's home, and the associated chance of losing it." We presume that all those property owners not averse to collecting insurance (and not worrying about losing the photo albums, CD collection, and the family cat) can go ahead and put their azaleas in close formation.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Web site features a folk song—no kidding—about cleaning up your yard, and a scary movie ("Without 100 feet of defensible space, this house never had a chance.")

Some Southern Californians, eager to protect their real estate, have already complied with excessive enthusiasm, clearing their plots down to bare earth. This produces not only a very dreary yard but also a yard vulnerable to erosion, exposing the house to yet another California disaster—mud slides. (Plants shorter than 18 inches are allowed near the house. Well-watered flowers and succulent plants are recommended.) But bare earth doesn't stay bare; weedy annual grasses sprout fast, and when they die back, they're exceedingly flammable.

Beyond the idea of succulent plants—things like sedums and cacti that store water in their thick fleshy tissues—experts don't agree on what plants would be especially helpful. There is agreement (PDF) on what trees to avoid—junipers, pine trees, eucalyptus, and Italian cypress. Unhappily, pine trees and cypresses happen to be the particular favorites of the owners of Mediterranean-style luxury homes. (Here's more information on what not to plant and a map of which areas are at greatest risk.)

Of course any tree or plant will burn if the fire is strong enough, but well-watered plants do burn more slowly. So the advice is to keep your plants watered, get rid of debris, and lop off dead branches. All these steps are certainly reasonable (assuming there will be water for irrigation), but they underestimate the power of wind-driven smoldering wood. In November's Malibu fire, embers were flying horizontally in a 60-mph wind. With conditions like that, you could put a moat around your house and it would still catch fire.

The soon-to-be-mandatory vegetation whacking applies to what's in the homeowner's garden. But for years there has been a movement to have fire prevention extend farther into the wild, specifically to cut wide fire breaks through the native chaparral or initiate controlled burns of that native vegetation.

These are not great ideas. Like the bare yard space, the bare ground would sprout weedy grasses. And much would be lost. The chaparral plants, aside from being habitat for a lot of creatures, have deep roots that hold hillsides and cliffs in place, a useful trait in earthquake country. The plants catch the moisture of the winter rains and evaporate it back through their leaves into the atmosphere, beneficial in wildfire territory.

When you fly from San Francisco to San Diego, the olive-green velvet you see on the thinly populated hills below is chaparral. It's a dense, complex interweaving of low trees, shrubs, and plants, including scrub oak, ceanothus, manzanita, and sage. (The word chaparral is derived from a Basque word for a thicket of dwarf oaks.)

The same sort of mixture of vegetation, adapted to hot, dry summers and mild, rainy winters, grows in the south of France and is known as the maquis, a word with heroic connotations. The French resistance to the Nazi occupation was known as Le Maquis, from the phrase "prendre le maquis," to take to the hills.

One of the late Ronald Reagan's great pleasures when he took to the hills at his ranch above Santa Barbara was to attack the California maquis with a chain saw. Under the new state law, homeowners must be out there emulating the late president, or pay a $500 fine.

What makes that green velvet frightening to some is that many of the chaparral plants are combustible—it's the way they evolved to keep their species going in a fire-prone environment. For some of the plants, the strategy for weathering the dry summers is to become resinous, thus flammable, and to sprout back from the surviving crown within weeks after a fire. Others have seeds that actually require fire to germinate—either the heat causes the seed coat to split or the nitrogen dioxide in smoke sets off a reaction that causes the seed to crack and put out a green seedling the first time it rains.

Patches of the chaparral burned and renewed themselves for centuries. No one cared much until 40 or 50 years ago, when cities expanded. We've become frighteningly house-centric in our vision of how to manage the land.

One of the continuing and fascinating problems for all gardeners is how to learn to live with the power of natural forces. The chaparral plants adapted to live with drought and fire. Spacing out the trees and getting rid of dead wood seems for now to be our adaptation to the same fire-prone climate. Still, something will be lost if Southern California's hillsides turn into a mosaic of fire-retardant fortresses, with a landscape of isolated trees, stone terraces, and little flower beds mulched with colored pebbles rather than wood chips. These gardens will not blend gracefully into the natural surroundings. Homeowners may look up from their chain saw work and think, the groves of native oaks, the masses of blue-flowered ceanothus, the sage-scented air—weren't these a big part of why we wanted to live here?